Star Catalogues

In Stellarium version 0.9.0, star catalogues are split into 9 files, which contain stars of varying brightness. These files can be found in the <installation directory>/stars/default/. Only the smaller four of these files come with Stellarium in the main package to keep the size manageable.

About 99% of all these stars come from the NOMAD catalog (Naval Observatory Merged Astrometric Dataset version 1, by USNO). The rest (brighter ones) from Tycho2 and Hipparcos. Please see the stellarium README file for the conditions, under which you may redistribute data files originating from NOMAD.

Here is a list of all available catalogues. The RAM needed column is an estimate. (MNG managed to load file 7 with 512 M ram, but only just. YMMV).

NOTE: when downloading from this page, do not right-click and save as - left click. These are not direct download links - they are links to the list of download mirrors. Left click on them, and wait for your download to start.

For using stars_7_2v0_0.cat i recommend 1GB or RAM, and for stars_8_2v0_0.cat at lease 1.5GB.
In version 0.9.0 the catalogs are just loaded into RAM, and if you do not have enough of it, swapping will start. Add up the star catalog sizes, compare with your amount of RAM, and your common sense will tell you how many files you can load. Yours, Johannes

mmap loading

Since version 0.9.1 you can instruct your computer to load all the stars into main memory not at startup, but to load groups of stars when they are displayed for the first time. This is done using the operating systems mmap function, hence the name "mmap loading". Using this technique you can use all of the star catalogs even if you have very little RAM. Also the initial startup time is greatly decreased. The drawback is that your computer loads the stars during normal program operation, when they are used for the first time. Therefore the scrolling and zooming will not be so smooth as when you load all catalogs at startup in advance.

For each catalog file that you want to use, you can decide if you want to load it at startup or using mmap by prefixing the catalog name with "mmap:" in stars.ini:

In this example mmap loading is configured for stars_5,...,stars_8 only.

Errata

Prior to version 0.9.1 the files stars_3_1v0_0.cat and stars_5_2v0_0.cat were falsely called stars_3_0v0_0.cat and stars_5_1v0_0.cat. Now this misnaming is fixed. The contents of the files is unchanged, just the names have been fixed in order to reflect the contents, which is stars of type 1 and of type 2, respectively. All you have to do is make sure your file stars.ini lists the names of your star catalog files,
no matter whether you use the new names or the old ones.